Choice or constraint? Women’s weekly working hours in comparative perspective

Abstract

This article analyses the influence of individualworking preferences onwomen’s labour market behaviour in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, addressingthe question: to what extent do individual preferences have a causal effect onwomen’s averageweeklyworking hours? Using longitudinal panel data from all three countries, a fixed-effects model is applied to measure the effect of individual preferences in year t-1 onwomen’s averageweeklyworking hours in year t. The data is pooled from 1992 to 2002. After controlling for a number of individual, household and job characteristics we see that individual preferences are most influential in the Netherlands. However, the data do not support the idea that choice is more important than constraint because individual, household and job characteristics remain significant. In addition, the results demonstrate that it is important to understand individual preferences within the institutional context. Therefore, within the theoretical and policy debates aboutwomen’s labour market participationwe must consider possible barriers that hinder women when making labour market “choices”.

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